NASA Announces Long-term IMERG Satellite Record: A Near-Global 19-year Perspective on Rain and Snow NASA has just released its newest estimate of rain and snow covering the past 19 years. It's code name: Version 6 IMERG. NASA's IMERG -- the Integrated Multi-satellitE Retrievals for GPM -- combines information from whatever constellation of satellites are operating in Earth orbit at a given time, to estimate precipitation over the majority of the Earth's surface. This algorithm is particularly valuable over the majority of the Earth's surface that lacks precipitation-measuring instruments on...

NASA’s Precipitation Measurement Missions (PMM) have collected rain and snowfall from space for nearly 20 years, and for the first time in 2019, scientists can access PMM’s entire record as one data set. PMM includes two missions – the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM), which orbited Earth from 1997 to 2015, and its successor, the joint NASA-JAXA Global Precipitation Measurement mission (GPM), which has been collecting data since 2014. This year, however, the GPM project upgraded its data algorithms to calibrate and incorporate TRMM data into its release, giving researchers, modelers...

Download this video in high resolution from the NASA Goddard Scientific Visualization Studio Five years ago, on Feb. 27, 2014, the Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) Core Observatory, a joint satellite project by NASA and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), lifted off aboard a Japanese H-IIA rocket. Since then, the cutting-edge instruments on GPM have provided advanced measurements about the rain and snow particles within clouds, Earth’s precipitation patterns, extreme weather and myriad ways precipitation around the world affects society. Among the uses of GPM data are helping...

For the past 5 years GPM data has provided critical information to end-users to further our understanding of Earth's water cycle and to facilitate decision‐making at local and global scales. Building on the legacy of TRMM, the use of high‐quality precipitation data provided by GPM, with global coverage, has enabled new science research and data applications to benefit society across a diverse range of applications including water resource and ecological management, operational numerical weather prediction, disease prediction, and disaster modeling and response. Here are five highlights of the...

Download in high resolution from the NASA Goddard Scientific Visualization Studio NASA researchers now can use a combination of satellite observations to re-create multi-dimensional pictures of hurricanes and other major storms in order to study complex atmospheric interactions. In this video, they applied those techniques to Hurricane Matthew. When it occurred in the fall of 2016, Matthew was the first Category 5 Atlantic hurricane in almost ten years. Its torrential rains and winds caused significant damage and loss of life as it coursed through the Caribbean and up along the southern U.S...

The William T. Pecora Award is presented annually to individuals or groups that make outstanding contributions toward understanding the Earth by means of remote sensing. The award is sponsored jointly by the Department of the Interior (DOI) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). The award was established in 1974 to honor the memory of Dr. William T. Pecora, former Director of the U.S. Geological Survey and Under Secretary, Department of the Interior. Dr. Pecora was a motivating force behind the establishment of a program for civil remote sensing of the Earth from space...

Credits: NASA/Goddard This video and related visualizations are public domain and can be downloaded at the Scientific Visualization Studio Precipitation (falling rain and snow) is our fresh water reservoir in the sky and is fundamental to life on Earth. A Global Tour of Precipitation from NASA shows how rain and snowfall moves around the world from the vantage of space using measurements from the Global Precipitation Measurement Core Observatory, or GPM. This is a joint mission between NASA and the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and offers the most detailed and worldwide view of...

To get young students reading about science, NASA is trying something different. Instead of a press release or a scientific paper, the Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) mission has launched a Japanese manga-style comic book. GPM, a satellite collaboration between NASA and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, provides global estimates of rain and snow every three hours using advanced instruments. In spring 2013, a GPM Anime Challenge was held for artists from around the world aged 13 years and up to develop an anime-themed character for teaching students about the GPM mission. By...

As we enter the new year, take a look back at the snowstorms, tropical storms, typhoons, hurricanes and floods captured and analyzed by the Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) mission from around the globe during 2015. The complete list of storms by date and location are as follows: 1. New England Nor’easter – January 26 – New England, USA 2. Snowstorm – February 17 – Kentucky, Virginia and North Carolina, USA 3. Tornadic Thunderstorms in Midwest – March 25 – Oklahoma and Arkansas, USA 4. Typhoon Maysak – March 30 – Yap Islands, Southwest Pacific Ocean 5. Rain Accumulation from Cyclone...

June 16, 2015, Update: The Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) spacecraft re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere on June 15, 2015, at 11:55 p.m. EDT, over the South Indian Ocean, according to the U.S. Strategic Command’s Joint Functional Component Command for Space through the Joint Space Operations Center (JSpOC). The U.S. Space Surveillance Network, operated by the Defense Department's JSpOC, had been closely monitoring TRMM’s descent since the mission was ended in April. Most of the spacecraft was expected to burn up in the atmosphere during its uncontrolled re-entry. This U.S. Air Force...